A storm breaks over a temple, and the poem hardly looks at the temple at all. Dave Bonta's "Temple in a storm" gives us only its trees, then swerves to something much humbler: an outhouse that makes the speaker "almost sick" and then shudders under the thunder. The central idea sits in that swerve. Holiness and plain bodily discomfort share the same weather, and the poem seems more honest for letting them stand side by side.
The first couplet is the most ambitious. "rain on the temple trees / like words in the book of a blind beggar" turns the sound of rain into a kind of writing. A blind man cannot read his book, so the words are there but out of reach. The rain, likewise, is a text we can hear but not decipher. The pairing of "temple" with "beggar" also quietly lowers the sacred. Scripture is not in the hands of a priest but a poor, sightless man, which suggests that meaning may reach those who can only listen. That is an inference from the imagery, but the simile invites it. The sound of the lines helps too: the b's in "book," "blind," and "beggar" patter like heavy drops, and the long "ee" of "trees" lingers like water still dripping from leaves.
Then the tone changes. "the outhouse / which made me almost sick" is bathos, a sudden drop from the lofty to the lowly, and it is funny. The word "almost" does a lot of work. It is the hedge of someone telling the truth about a small, unpleasant moment, without drama and without making himself the hero of a spiritual scene. After a simile so elegant, the plain colloquial voice comes as a relief. The speaker stays honest, and his honesty is what makes the earlier image believable.
The poem's structure is its cleverest feature. It is written in three two-line stanzas, with no rhyme, no punctuation, and no capital letters, so it moves at the pace of speech. But look at how the final sentence is built. "The outhouse which made me almost sick shivered from top to bottom with the outside thunder" is a single sentence, yet the stanza break cuts it open after "sick." The verb "shivered" is held back across that white space and arrives only at the start of the last couplet. The reader waits for the main verb the way one waits for thunder after lightning, and the delay gives the verb extra force. It also makes "shivered" do double duty. The shed trembles, but the word belongs just as naturally to a queasy body, so the building and the speaker seem to share one shudder.
"Outside thunder" is a curious phrase. Nobody needs to be told that thunder is outdoors, so the word "outside" tells us where the speaker is: probably inside, in the cramped shed, hearing the storm through thin walls. This is again an inference from the text, but it fits. The temple trees receive the rain in the open, while the speaker is shut in a smelly little box, close enough to feel each thunderclap. The poem sets the vast and the cramped against each other, and the cramped place turns out to be where the storm is felt most physically. The outhouse becomes a kind of instrument, a thin wooden drum played by the sky.
What makes the poem significant is how much it gets from so little. In six short lines it joins a scriptural image to a comic, almost unpleasant one, and it never tells us which matters more. The temple is never entered, and its holiness stays at a distance, carried only by trees and rain. The ordinary, slightly disgusting shed gets the verb and the last word. The poem seems to suggest that wonder does not need a worthy setting. A storm will shake a temple and a privy alike, and a speaker who is feeling a little ill can still hear something like scripture in the rain.